Manufacturer Agnostic here. Since 1982 (before PCs) I have seen all of them have bad runs of drives. I have had very very few fail over the years.

The new drives now have a MTBF of 1,000,000 hours, which is roughly 114 years. Like Vermaden mentioned, seek time is a big factor, and you have idiots who won't buy a drive because it runs at 5400 RPM, which is cooler anyway, and if the access time is better rotational speed means nothing (except more heat).

I have always had issues with WD caviar drives. Everyone I have ever had has crashed and burned. Maxtor and Seagate I have never had issues with. I believe I have an old Samsung drive around here that is about a 500mb drive that still works perfectly. I'll have to find that drive to make sure it is a Samsung though

__________________religions, worst damnation of mankind"If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened." Linus TorvaldsLinux is not UNIX! Face it! It is not an insult. It is fact: GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU's Not UNIX”.vermaden's:linksresourcesdeviantartspreadbsd

I have had a particular WD hard drive for 8 years now which has been under fairly heavy usage for most of that time and only recently has it started firing warning shots by spinning down when it gets too hot. If a hard drive is going to fail it should do so with kindness by giving you some cautionary advice, and that's just what WD appears to do.

Having said that, like most people here I don't have any particularly bad experiences with any other hard disk vendor.

FWIW I've had problems with WD and success with Seagate. My stratagy (if you can call it that) is to buy drives that are 'old fashioned', in other words mature technologies. This means they tend to be at the small end of the available size range.

I may well be mistaken, but I understood SCSI disks to be mechanically the same as the equivalent IDE drives. Perhaps the smarter SCSI electronics make the life of the mechanical parts easier. If not then why would they be better?

A SCSI bus allows simultaneous transfers between the host and multiple targets. So your OS can read from one disk while writing to another, which is the biggest advantage. In addition, one can string many devices onto a single SCSI bus, if necessary. In addition, the SCSI bus can be shared by multiple computing systems -- allowing for shared storage systems, but not shared devices.

IDE is limited to a communicating with a single device at a time, and has a maximum of two peripheral devices per bus, with a single host.

__________________religions, worst damnation of mankind"If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened." Linus TorvaldsLinux is not UNIX! Face it! It is not an insult. It is fact: GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU's Not UNIX”.vermaden's:linksresourcesdeviantartspreadbsd

Over the years i have had computers, the only hard drives I have ever had issues with over the years were all made by WD. I still have a 500mb Samsung drive that works perfectly, and I have never had any issues with Seagate or Maxtor. My main system have been running a Maxtor or Seagate drive for the last 10 years and I have yet to have one fail. I have tried a few WD drives out and they have all failed in one of my other systems and have had to replace them time and time again to the point where I will never use another WD made drive again

Have been using Seagate for approx 20 years now without any problems whatsoever. Only due to the 7200.11 bug last year I decided to go with WD RE3, following Carpetsmoker's recommendation. And they are nice and quiet and fast enough for my purposes.

__________________religions, worst damnation of mankind"If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened." Linus TorvaldsLinux is not UNIX! Face it! It is not an insult. It is fact: GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU's Not UNIX”.vermaden's:linksresourcesdeviantartspreadbsd